


Effective Escape Plans

by FernDavant



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Hijinks, Shenanigans, long-term travelling companions with pre-created escape plans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 13:57:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6378775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FernDavant/pseuds/FernDavant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trapped down an alley, with guards encroaching, the Doctor and Clara need to come up with a plan to paper over the petty theft, drunkenness, and bickering.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Effective Escape Plans

**Author's Note:**

> For Whouffaldi Appreciation Week 2k16, 27th March. Prompt: ‘i do’, running, lips

“Okay, I think we should establish a new rule,” Clara whispered, breathless from all the running they’d done. They’d hit a dead end. Trapped down an alley, between two buildings. This was bad, but they’d been in worse situations.

“I’m all ears,” the Doctor responded, fiddling with his sonic sunglasses, eyes darting around, trying to figure out a plan of escape even as they heard the commotion their pursuers were causing at the nearby garden party.

“New rule: Don’t listen to Drunk Clara,” Clara said, leaning rather heavily on the Doctor.

There was a long pause, and then the Doctor looked down at Clara with a panicked look on his face. “Okay, so, I have some problems with this rule. Firstly, I’m fairly sure you’re still Drunk Clara, so if I listen to you, then it would be bad, because I will be listening to Drunk Clara. Secondly, if I don’t listen to you, then I’m not listening to Drunk Clara, which would mean that I have accidentally, implicitly, listened to Drunk Clara about not listening to Drunk Clara. I’m finding this very confusing. Is this a human thing? I’m not picking up on the nuances here. Is this a riddle? Is the answer ‘man?’ No, that’s the one about what walks on four legs in the morning, and—“

“Just get us out of this,” Clara hissed, shoving him. “And next time I’m drunk and suggest breaking into the royal palace of Genvigian or wherever, maybe you should consider saying, ‘That’s a bad idea,’ instead of ‘Great plan! Let’s steal their China plates.’”

The Doctor dug into his coat pocket, and brought out a plate embossed with a picture of a smiling, big-eared man with closely-shaven hair. “They’ve got pictures of me on them. In some places, that means I own them by rights!”

“You kept the plates?” Clara asked exasperatedly. “I told you to get rid of the evidence. What the hell does get rid of the evidence _mean_ to you?”

“Put it in my pocket?”

“No! Besides, you can’t exactly tell them it’s you on the plates. The face you’re wearing now and the face you were wearing then don’t exactly match up.”

“I see your point,” the Doctor said, looking appraisingly at his former self. “We have very different haircuts.”

Clara gave him a look, even as she could hear the sound of footsteps approaching the alleyway they were stuck in. “Hey, how good a look do you think they got of us?”

“Well, you were halfway down the drain pipe by the time they’d fully broken through,” the Doctor contemplated, shooting a look at Clara. “And I do have the goods.”

“Plan Q into a Plan T?” Clara supplied, even as the Doctor handed her his sonic sunglasses for her to tuck away in a shirt pocket.

“Yep,” the Doctor said, biting his upper lip hard enough to bleed, passable as a busted lip. He carefully sat the plate aside, before skidding on one of his knees, hard enough to tear a hole in his trousers, and scraping the palm of his left hand, scooping the plate back up with his right, and getting into a rough approximation of a sprawl on his knees.

Clara scraped her knuckles against the wall and had the Doctor by the collar just as the palace guards skidded to a halt in front of them.

“This who you were looking for?” Clara asked, congratulating herself for only stumbling on her words slightly.

The guards looked from Clara to the Doctor and then back again. “What happened?”

“I was taking a break from the festivities, and this bloody madman comes running down here. I thought he was going to try to get handsy. I heard you lot coming, and realized what he was carrying. Frankly, I feel a thank you is involved.”

“You took him down?” one of the guards questioned skeptically.

“I have a mean right hook,” Clara said with a grin, cracking the knuckles of her hand. The Doctor spat blood from his lip to emphasize.

“Are you drunk?” another guard asked.

Clara pulled herself up to her full height, tried not to sway, and then said, “Drunk enough to do your jobs for you.”

This seemed sufficient to make the guards quail. Their apparent leader took a step towards the Doctor and sneered, “Do you know the punishment for stealing from the royal palace?”

“I do,” the Doctor responded. “It’s to be imprisoned at local coordinates 4.07 x 35 x 2.16 until this planet’s dawn, approximately four hours and forty-three minutes from now, and then to be hanged with this funny sort of spikey rope that, I hear, is quite painful, but also a really lovely shade of yellow.”

The guards blinked, confused.

“I think he’s more drunk than I am,” Clara huffed, shoving the Doctor by the collar towards the guards. “And I really would like to fix that, so, can I go now?”

“Alright,” the captain of the guard said with a nod, yanking the plate out of the Doctor’s hand as a few other guards hauled him to his feet and cuffed him.

The Doctor, completely unstealthily, winked cheekily at Clara. Luckily, it had been established to everyone’s satisfaction that he was quite mad, so he got away with it.

Three hours later, Clara had broken a heel, staged a prison break, and destroyed the entire stock of spikey rope, along with the instructions for how to manufacture it. Drunk Clara wasn’t as bad as initially advertised.

Meanwhile, the Doctor had stolen back some plates with his face on it and complained about ripping his best trousers, even though the TARDIS could make literally infinite pairs of exactly the same trousers. Sober Doctor was basically a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get proposition.

 


End file.
